Artificial Divides

Artificial Divides Melissa Valiska Gregory (bio) "She was a poet. She was not a Poetess." —paula bennett on Lydia Sigourney, 2007 "We should not assume that all women poets wrote within a poetess tradition." —yopie prins, 2012 "Who made the Poetess white? No one; not ever." —tricia lootens, 2017 What do we gain by thinking about the Poetess as a taxonomic category? As these quotations from Paula Bennet, Yopie Prins, and Tricia Lootens suggest, considerable critical energy over the years has gone to shoring up the concept's taxonomic boundaries. Although feminist scholars have not always agreed upon a single definition of the Poetess, in applying the term not only to specific historical figures but also to certain types of poetic performance and even particular generic conventions, most scholarship on the Poetess promotes the binary between "Poetess" and "poet" as two categories that cannot be simultaneously occupied. Did nineteenth-century women writers share this schematic commitment in their authorial lives or published work? Or is the line between poet and Poetess an artificial divide that we inherited from twentieth-century criticism on the lyric—an inheritance that demanded we leverage the cultural impact of the Poetess tradition to justify the resurrection of women writers excluded from the literary canon by male editors? To explore this question, I offer a case study of nineteenth-century essayist, novelist, artist, and poet Caroline Anne Bowles. Like Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and many others, Bowles began her literary career in the Romantic era, and her work continued to circulate well into the mid-1850s, when she died.1 Her most well-known poems were sentimental and frequently republished. Was Bowles a Poetess? To answer, I will offer two different versions of Caroline Bowles. In the first, Bowles is obviously a Poetess. In the second, she isn't—at least, she isn't in a way that I hope reveals the possible shortcomings of this taxonomic category as a frame of interpretation for women writers. Version 1: Bowles the Poetess. Bowles's contemporaries Robert Southey, William Howitt, and Henry Nelson Coleridge all praised Bowles for being a Poetess, and the thematic and formal conventions of Bowles's poetry from the 1820s and 1830s align with Hemans and the other women writers who also received this designation.2 Indeed, Bowles seems to have deliberately leveraged the conventions of Poetess poetry to achieve wider print circulation. If, as scholars like Prins and Virginia Jackson have suggested, the figure [End Page 151] of the Poetess often means the lack of a specific self or consciousness—the Poetess works as a kind of detachable trope—then this is amply apparent in Bowles's most popular poems, which cultivate a particular kind of generic feminine authorial identity. Consider, for example, Bowles's most widely circulated poem, "To a Dying Infant," a relatively brief child elegy of twenty-three stanzas first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in July 1821 under the initial "C.," then included, with the thirteenth stanza omitted, in her first solo volume, Solitary Hours (1826). The poem feels intentionally generic, as it carefully avoids any individual markers that might reveal the author or make the poem read like a tribute to a specific person. It is a poem that signifies broadly, suitable for reprinting in multiple other venues, such as literary annuals, which could pay quite well. Indeed, after its initial publication in Blackwood's, "To a Dying Infant" was repeatedly reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic up to 1918, appearing in other periodicals, newspapers, consolation books, volumes of poetic extracts or "gems," collections of religious or fugitive verse, and school recitation books. This kind of widespread circulation aligns with the main features of the Poetess as a taxonomic category for feminine, sentimental, highly commercial poetry written for mass circulation. Version 2: Bowles was not a Poetess. Although other writers and editors assigned the Poetess label to Bowles, she never attained the widespread commercial circulation of Hemans or Sigourney. Most of Bowles's poems were published anonymously, and even a poem as popular as "To a Dying Infant" didn't establish a long-lasting literary reputation for Bowles. When Bowles died in 1854, more than...

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